Ferroelectric materials such as lead-zirconate-titanate (“PZT”) can be used as the dielectric material in a ferroelectric capacitor that in turn is used as the memory element in a nonvolatile memory cell, latch, or counter. In order to be useful as the memory element in a semiconductor nonvolatile memory, latch, or counter, however, a ferroelectric capacitor must retain data for an extended period of time at a given storage temperature. The ability to retain data, also known as retention performance, is adversely affected by a multi-faceted mechanism known generally by those skilled in the art as “imprint”. The term imprint is used because it implies that the history of the data stored in the ferroelectric capacitor affects its present retention performance. Specifically, storage or writing of data of the same binary value for a long period of time at temperature undesirably degrades the ability of the ferroelectric capacitor to retain data of the opposite binary value.
In a ferroelectric nonvolatile counter, the most significant bits stay at a logic zero data state until the count number is large enough to flip the logic state to a logic one data state, if conventional binary coding methods are used. For a counter with a large number of bits, the most significant bits are written (clocked) to the logic zero data state many times before they are eventually written to a logic one data state. For example, in a 40 bit counter, the most significant bit is written to a logic zero data state 239 times, which is about 1012 times, before it is finally written to a logic one data state. Thus, this most significant bit and the associated nonvolatile ferroelectric capacitor is very significantly imprinted to the logic zero data state, and the imprinting will therefore negatively impact its ability to retain the logic one data state.
Turning now to FIG. 1, a prior art conventional five-bit binary coding scheme is shown. Note that while the least-significant bit (“LSB”) switches with every advancement of the count, the most-significant bit (“MSB”) does not switch until sixteen zero data states have been written to the associated ferroelectric capacitor. Of course, the imprint problem increases for the most-significant bits as the total number of bits in the counter increases.
What is desired, therefore, is a novel coding scheme in which none of the counter bits is repeatedly forced to the same data state, but is frequently switched so that the undesirable performance degradation due to imprint can be minimized.